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Comment by mapontosevenths | Hacker News Reader

I'm in favor of using all the tools available to better yourself, including LLM's. However, for things like this the I would argue that one should first try to understand it on their own.

Sometimes the work is the POINT. We read things like this not just to learn about the past, but for novelty and to exercise our critical thinking powers. To outsource that labor before even trying is like going to the gym and having your butler lift the weights. The weights got lifted, but what was really accomplished?

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Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself. They were more like a written-down formal speech to be slowly pondered upon than something to be read smoothly and silently on one's own, which is how we now regard almost all texts. There was "labor" involved but that labor was not really about being more literate or exercising more critical thinking: it was simply about slowly recreating in one's mind the kind of broad structural scaffold we now expect to see in a text as a matter of course. It's in fact easier to think critically about a text when its sections and structure are clearly laid out, and having a LLM do this for you is a nice way of avoiding personal tendencies and biases that might lead one to misinterpret what the text is really about.

>Historically, these texts were often consumed (especially in formal or semi-formal settings) by either having them read aloud for you or reading them aloud yourself.

In the middle ages this was true, mostly because few people were literate at all and the words didnt have spaces between them. The ability to read silently was regarded as impressive.

By 1911 reading silently to yourself was the expectation of a normal literate adult. Only hillbillies and their ilk could not.

This is a simple text, intended to be legible even to school children of the era. It's also very structured already.

Their contemporary English was a bit different, but not so far removed that you should need assistance.

It was very much the norm in formal and semi-formal gatherings. They didn't have conference talks with PowerPoint slide decks, their own equivalent was to read out articles or papers. This often extended to university-level lectures, in a practice that was arguably carried over from the middle ages as you mention, but was very much still in use.

> It's also very structured already.

It's definitely not very structured by modern standards. The length of paragraphs alone would be described as "wall of text". Again, this was an ordinary practice back in the day, aimed at saving costly paper and reducing the manual effort involved in physically laying out the work on the page. It was far from exceptional: to a first approximation, most texts from the early 20th c. or before will look like that.

Yes, let the LLM bias and misinterpret it instead.

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